People's Communes Movement
The People's Communes Movement reorganized roughly 740,000 rural agricultural cooperatives into more than 26,000 people's communes between April and October 1958, merging farming, local industry, commerce, education, and militia functions into single administrative units. It began with a pilot commune at Chayashan in Henan in April 1958 and was formalized nationwide by the CCP Central Committee's Beidaihe resolution of August 29, 1958. Within months, over 99 percent of China's farming households had been organized into communes, which replaced household landholding with collective ownership and established communal dining halls, becoming the organizational backbone of the Great Leap Forward's agricultural campaign. The commune system persisted, in progressively weakened form, until rural decollectivization in the early 1980s.
The movement's first concrete step came on April 20, 1958, when officials in Suiping County, Henan, merged 27 existing cooperatives and 9,369 households into the "Chayashan Agricultural Great Cooperative," soon renamed the Sputnik People's Commune on the suggestion of Vice Premier Tan Zhenlin. It became the model held up nationwide as the movement's starting point. Three months later, on July 19, Liu Shaoqi previewed the coming policy shift in a speech at Tianjin, proposing "one township, one commune" (一乡一社) and "unifying government and commune administration," and describing the commune — encompassing industry, agriculture, and schooling "from cradle to grave" — as "a communist commune," in language that anticipated the Beidaihe resolution by six weeks.
Mao Zedong lent the movement decisive momentum during a tour of Henan from August 6 to 8, 1958. Visiting the newly formed Qiliying People's Commune in Xinxiang County on August 6, he remarked "还是人民公社好" ("People's communes are still better") — a comment publicized nationwide and widely credited with accelerating the rush to establish communes across the country in the following weeks.
The Politburo's enlarged conference at Beidaihe, held August 17–30, 1958, formalized the policy: on August 29 the CCP Central Committee passed the "Resolution on the Establishment of People's Communes in the Rural Areas," codifying the principle that communes should be "larger in scale and more public in ownership" (一大二公) and framing them as the organizational bridge from socialism to communism. By the end of October 1958, more than 740,000 agricultural cooperatives had been reorganized into over 26,000 people's communes encompassing some 120 million farming households — over 99 percent of China's rural population.
Communes abolished private plots and household cooking in favor of communal dining halls and centrally directed labor, disrupting the incentives and local knowledge that had structured village agriculture. These organizational failures, compounded by inflated production reporting and grain over-procurement, are widely identified by historians as a major contributing factor to the Three Years of Great Famine that followed. After 1962, authorities restored the production team as the basic accounting unit under a "three-level ownership, team as the base" adjustment, and communes as an administrative structure were not formally dissolved until rural decollectivization in the early 1980s.
Narrative Comparison
| Source | Narrative |
|---|---|
| 1958 CCP Central Committee Resolution | The Beidaihe resolution presented communes as a historic advance: by integrating agriculture, industry, commerce, education, and military affairs into a single organization and adopting the principle of being "larger in scale and more public in ownership," they would unlock productive forces and organize social life on a scale that could carry China from socialism directly into communism, with communal dining halls and childcare freeing labor — especially women's labor — for production. |
| Frank Dikötter, Mao's Great Famine (2010) | Drawing on provincial and county archives, Dikötter characterizes the communization drive as a coercive amalgamation that stripped peasants of any control over their land, labor, and food, replacing household autonomy with centrally dictated production targets that local cadres, under intense political pressure, routinely inflated — laying the groundwork for the mass starvation of the following years. |
| Yang Jisheng, Tombstone (2008) | Yang, a former Xinhua journalist who gained access to restricted provincial archives, documents how communal dining halls — meant to demonstrate the arrival of communism — instead became sites of waste, favoritism, and later desperate rationing, as local officials continued reporting record harvests to superiors even as grain reserves collapsed and villagers began to starve. |
Key Milestones
- Sputnik People's Commune Established at Chayashan
27 cooperatives and 9,369 households in Suiping County, Henan merge into the "Chayashan Agricultural Great Cooperative," soon renamed the Sputnik People's Commune — the pilot model for the national movement.
- Liu Shaoqi's Tianjin Speech
Liu Shaoqi proposes "one township, one commune" (一乡一社) and "unifying government and commune administration" in a speech at Tianjin, describing the commune as encompassing industry, agriculture, and schooling "from cradle to grave" — "a communist commune" — anticipating the Beidaihe resolution's language by six weeks.
- Mao Zedong Visits Qiliying Commune
During a tour of Henan, Mao visits the newly formed Qiliying People's Commune in Xinxiang County and remarks "人民公社好" ("People's communes are good"), publicized nationwide and credited with accelerating the movement.
- Beidaihe Resolution Formalizes Nationwide Communization
The CCP Central Committee passes the "Resolution on the Establishment of People's Communes in the Rural Areas" at the Beidaihe conference, making communization official national policy.
- Over 99% of Farming Households Organized into Communes
By the end of October 1958, more than 740,000 agricultural cooperatives had been reorganized into over 26,000 people's communes covering roughly 120 million farming households nationwide.
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